Tegan Tuesday: Disabled activists are using South Korea’s lack of accessibility to fight for human rights

My first introduction to disability rights was at a mock trial when I was a teenager. For those unfamiliar with the structure of mock trials, schools all across the US are given the same fake trial, and students must prepare both prosecution and defense against other school districts. It’s an introduction to the law process in the US and an interesting bit of mental competition. I remember one of the years that I was competing, the plaintiff was a disabled newscaster suing a news network for discriminatory hiring practices, stating that the network was not interesting in working with a newscaster in a wheelchair.

Among the many things our team had to learn to work on this case was what counts as discrimination, and what categories of people counted as a “protected class”. In the U.S., race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, and age are the current protected classes. Partial protection from disability discrimination was from the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, with additional protection from the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA). Our fictional law case had the news station only paying attention to the original Civil Rights Act of 1964, which only protects discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. As an able-bodied person with no disabled people in my immediate family, I hadn’t ever considered the discrimination disabled people face. My mock trial team knew about how much effort went into getting the Civil Rights Act, and we assumed that a similar amount of effort was put in for all subsequent additions. And that’s where we left it; no actual research was done on the disability activists who made the relevant law happen.

The next time I heard much about disability activism was 2017 when activists were arrested outside Mitch McConnell’s office. The activist group ADAPT (Americans Disabled for Attendant Programs Today) had staged “die-ins” with wheelchair users abandoning their wheelchairs, making it harder to force the protesters to leave, as well as making the visual impact of removing said protesters stronger. In the many discussions and articles I read about the activists in 2017, I learned of how throughout much of the last fifty years disabled activists have been fighting. Not just for their lives, although they certainly have fought for that, but for the right to exist in public, to have jobs, to have families. One of the actions that ADAPT is known for are the protests throughout the 1980s for accessible buses. A quick summary from Wikipedia states:

Throughout the 1980s, the campaign for bus lifts expanded out from Denver to cities nationwide. ADAPTers became well known for their tactic of immobilizing buses to draw attention to the need for lifts. Wheelchair users would stop a bus in front and back, and others would get out of their chairs and crawl up the steps of an inaccessible bus to dramatize the issue. Not only city buses but interstate bus services like Greyhound were targeted. By the end of the decade, after protests and lawsuits, ADAPT finally saw bus lifts required by law as part of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990.

As anyone who has ever seen or experienced the process of getting a wheelchair user onto a bus will know, the current system is still not particularly good. It varies from place to place, but it generally requires the bus to laboriously lower a ramp, let the rider wheel on, then equally-laboriously raise the ramp. The process is repeated when the rider needs to exit. It takes time, which delays the schedule, and there is often only space for one or two wheelchair users on a bus. But, technically, officially, wheelchair users are able to ride the bus with the non-wheelchair-using populace. There’s just the implied and hoped-for expectation that most wheelchair users will avoid the bus. In a world where punctuality is often so important, and time is often so short, the setup almost seems designed to focus attention – and impatience – on disabled people just trying to go about their day.

This situation isn’t limited to just the US. In both Scotland and Ireland, my experience has been that anyone requiring a mobility aid has had to make an ordeal of their entering a bus. Cue my lack of surprise to find that South Korea has a similar issue with public transit. Since mid-December, Hyehwa station in Seoul has been the center of a new fight for disability rights.

Disability rights activists, many of them in wheelchairs, have been staging subway protests to demand accommodations on public transit. And on [April 15th] the demonstrators chained themselves to each other and to a portable ladder, reenacting a 2001 protest where activists chained themselves to the subway tracks. Now they shouted, “Pass a budget for disabled citizens! No rights without a budget!” They boarded trains in groups, which requires transit workers to install and uninstall wheelchair ramps, thus causing delays. A few of the activists had recently shaved their heads in public, a monkish ritual of sacrifice.

Lee Hyoung-sook, who leads a local advocacy group, was among those with her head shaved. At Gyeongbokgung station, she tried to board the train en route to Hyehwa station. Subway workers brought out a ramp so her wheels wouldn’t get stuck in the large gap between the platform and the car. Four more wheelchair users waited their turn to board in other sections of the train. While workers moved their one ramp around to get every wheelchair activist on board, the subway doors kept closing in on them. “Fellow citizens, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience,” Lee told her fellow passengers.

These subway protests are being led by the largest disability-rights activist group, Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination (SADD). This is far from the first time that SADD has been in the news. In 2016, the group was protesting the 6-tiered disability system that ranks the amount of support any individual can receive. The activists were visibly pulled from chairs and dragged out of an international social work conference. Current South Korean president, Yoon Seuk-yeol, is the head of the conservative People’s Power Party, and the official response from the government has been as helpful as 2016’s sanctioned violence. The head of the political party – and the president’s right-hand-man – Lee Jun-seok, has claimed that the activism is illegal, an “uncivilized backward strategy” and that the activists are “playing the minority card” to villainize the majority. My, that’s certainly a familiar conservative refrain.

According to 2020 surveys, 32% of disabled Koreans don’t have access to medical care, 85.6% of disabled Koreans have been unable to pursue higher education, and the majority of the people surveyed stated that lack of accessible transportation was the primary reason. The transit activism runs parallel to efforts to improve conditions in residential facilities, as current statistics indicate that fully half of disabled Koreans living in care homes die before age 50, and a third of them don’t even make it to 30. But care home residents are not as visible as subway stoppages, so awareness has to come from without. SADD’s demands are simple: they want the rights of disabled citizens guaranteed, same as any other citizen.

SADD currently has been demanding the government to draw up four major bills relating to the basic rights of disabled. The disabled advocacy group has been also asking the government to secure budgetary funds for disability rights in the 2023 fiscal plan, in addition to an official meeting with the new administration’s finance minister.

Laws protecting the rights, freedoms, and safety of people have always been written in blood; I hope the South Korean government sees the value in the lives of disabled people before more blood is shed.

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The people of Atlanta are standing up for themselves, because their government won’t.

I revisit the subject of urban greenery on a fairly regular basis. My vision of a better world still involves cities, but I want those cities to be integrated with the surrounding ecosystems as much as possible. Rather than being a sort of desert landscape, we could have cities that could almost feel like living in a forest. Beyond the mental and physical health benefits, there’s also the fact that plants tend to lower the temperature around them, rather than simply absorbing heat the way asphalt and concrete do. As the climate warms, the amount of plant life in and around cities is going to make a big difference in how hot they get. To that end, we should be both advocating for new green spaces, and defending those that currently exist, whether or not that existence is “official”.

I add that last bit because there’s just such a fight going on right now in Atlanta, GA. A prison farm that used convict slaves to grow food for Atlanta’s prison population closed down in 1989, and has since been increasingly consumed by forest. That’s all well and good, but there are a couple problems. The land is still owned by the city, and it’s apparently been used as a dumping ground, and a firing range for Atlanta police. The early stages of a new development project have begun, which will clear away a big chunk of the forest in order to make a sort of “dummy city” for the cops to train in.

Because as we all know, what we need is for law enforcement to become more militarized.

That would be bad enough, but unfortunately there’s more to the story. I’ll just quote the folks working to defend the forest:

ATLANTA IS A CITY IN A FOREST

We have the highest percentage of tree canopy of any major metropolitan area in America. Our canopy is the main factor in ensuring Atlanta’s resiliency in the face of climate change. The forest in Southeast Atlanta is home to wetlands that filter rainwater and prevent flooding. It is also one of the last breeding grounds for many amphibians in the region, as well as an important migration site for wading birds.

The history of this particular land is deeply scarred. In the 1800s shortly after the land was stolen from Muscogee Creek peoples, it was used as a plantation. In the early 1900s, a prison farm was opened where inmates were forced to perform unpaid agricultural labor, marking the rebranding of slavery into for profit prison labor. The Atlanta Police Department currently uses this hallowed ground as a firing range.

This forest is at risk of destruction as the police and Hollywood make plans to pave over Atlanta’s largest remaining green space.

The Atlanta Police Department seeks to turn 300 acres of forest into a tactical training compound featuring a mock city. This project was recently announced to the shock of community members who had been given no opportunity to weigh in on the proposal. The entire process has been shadier than the forest itself.

Intrenchment Creek is an existing public park adjacent to the Prison Farm. Dekalb County seeks to swap this land with Blackhall Studios, a major film production company. Blackhall wants to clear cut 170 acres of forest to develop into an airport and erect the largest sound stage in America. This project would cement Atlanta as the new Hollywood, making the cost of living in our city outrageous.

We refuse to let our forest be bulldozed in favor of the police and sold out to Hollywood. There are many forms of action and advocacy to be taken. This is a broad, decentralized, autonomous movement. Get involved in whatever ways move you. Take a walk in the forest with your friends.

Forests and other wild spaces are vital public resources, and should be protected. I’ve talked before about how enraging it is that we’re all forced to just go through life like nothing’s happening, while the rest of the biosphere collapses around us, and a tiny number of the most evil people on the planet use their obscene wealth and power to continue the destruction of everything we hold dear. It’s difficult to know how to discuss these things for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that I’m not always sure where the boundaries of legality are when it comes to discussing what to do about unjust laws. I’m very glad that movements like this go out of their way to avoid harming any of the people they’re trying to stop, but I also find it encouraging that they’re clearly unwilling to abide by a rule of law that would see us all die to maintain the lifestyles of the rich and powerful.

The reality is that if we are going to survive, we need to protect every halfway-healthy ecosystem we can. That may be less urgent than ending fossil fuel extraction and use, but not by a whole lot.

I was talking to someone on Twitter the other day about what I do and don’t want for the world, and because it’s so easy to miscommunicate on a platform like that I ended up doing a brief rundown of what changes I think humanity needs to make. It’s… It’s a lot. There’s so much work to do, it’s hard to wrap my head around. I talked a while back about the problem of chemical pollution, separate from climate change, and that’s something that we can help by stopping pollution at the source, but I think it’d be a very good idea for us to do what we can to actively clean stuff up. I’m no doctor, but maybe it’s not good that there’s plastic and other shit in our blood? That’s going to mean cleaning up old dumping grounds like the area in the Atlanta forest, and cleaning up what could be centuries of mine waste, and battlegrounds all over the world, and sunken ships, and all the while the richest people on the planet want to keep making that monumental task bigger.

At what point is it self defense to obstruct this kind of “development”? At what point is it self defense to force the closure of a factory that’s poisoning your water?

As with white supremacy, the United States has responded to these questions with bluster and resentful concessions at best, and outright denial at worst. The reality is that our current structure of laws and norms has always devalued life, and now it seems poised to simply make life impossible for large portions of the planet’s population.

Part of the reason I favor the approach of local organizing networked to allow for national or global action, is that while we face huge, planetary problems, their manifestations are local in nature. Different communities have different needs, and the people on the ground – as in Atlanta – best know what the stakes are for themselves. The same was true with the opposition to the Keystone pipeline extension – activists came from all across the country to help, and they put themselves under the leadership of the Indigenous people whose land they were trying to defend.

People in Atlanta are fighting to do what their city’s government will not, and preserve the ecosystem that gives Atlanta its best hope of a better future as the climate warms. I support what they’re doing, and I hope to see more actions like it in the coming years. Maybe I’m just a bit too cynical, but I don’t see our “leaders” doing anything real any time soon, and we’re short on time.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

New research shows climate action will save lives in the short term. Our leaders will not care.

A new study has found that decarbonizing the U.S. energy system would save tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars every year, and this will do nothing to make those in power move any faster.

A new study adds to the case for urgent decarbonization of the U.S. energy system, finding that slashing air pollution emissions from energy-related sources would bring near-term public health gains including preventing over 50,000 premature deaths and save $608 billion in associated benefits annually.

I’m going to make a brief aside here. At this point I have no faith that anyone with the power to make a difference on climate change will actually do so any time soon. Those empowered by our system have made it clear, through decades of inaction, that they have no interest in doing anything to prevent that system from destroying us all.

It’s also worth noting that the ideas of saving lives and money don’t actually hold any value to the people running our world. That number of premature deaths isn’t far off from the number killed by the US for-profit healthcare system, but because that system makes a few people very rich, it’s protected by both major parties. It doesn’t matter that a universal system would save money and lives, because that’s not the point. Likewise, the folks running the U.S. government are perfectly fine pouring trillions of dollars into endless war all over the planet. They do not care about lives lost or money wasted, as long as they get some personal benefit in the process.

That said, I like research like this. I think this kind of thing is useful in making the case that there are far fewer downsides to climate action than some would have us believe. It’s also useful for making the case that those who claim to care about life, money, or climate change are just lying for votes, for as long as they’re not doing everything they can for real climate action. When it’s clear that the truth is not enough to move the powerful to action, we need to consider how research like this can be used.

Published Monday in the journal GeoHealth, the analysis by Mailloux and fellow UW-Madison researchers focuses on emissions of fine particulate matter, referred to as PM2.5, and of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from the electric power, transportation, building, and industrial sectors.

Those sectors account for 90% of U.S. CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the paper notes. The bulk of the emissions from the sectors comes from fossil fuel use, though the study points to “a substantial portion” of particulate pollution stemming from wood and bark burning and “a small portion” resulting from non-combustion sources.

“Many of the same activities and processes that emit planet-warming GHGs also release health-harming air pollutant emissions; the current air quality-related health burden associated with fossil fuels is substantial,” the analysis states.

The study also notes that “the current pace of decarbonization in the U.S. is still incompatible with a world in which global warming is limited to 1.5°C or 2°C above pre-industrial levels,” and that “deep and rapid cuts in GHG emissions are needed in all energy-related sectors—including electric power, transportation, buildings, and industry—if states and the country as a whole are to achieve reductions consistent with avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.”

The researchers measured the potential benefits of the removal of the air pollution, ranging from all-cause mortality to non-fatal heart attacks and respiratory-related hospital admissions, using the Environmental Protection Agency’s CO-Benefits Risk Assessment tool.

They also looked at the impacts of both U.S.-wide and regional action on the reductions; they found that nationwide actions delivered the biggest benefits, though “all regions can prevent hundreds or thousands of deaths by eliminating energy-related emissions sources within the region, which shows the local benefits of local action to mitigate air quality issues.”

According to the analysis, the pollution reductions would save 53,200 premature deaths and provide $608 billion in annual benefits. The avoided deaths account for 98% of the monetary benefits. But apart from avoidance of human lives lost, the particulate matter reductions offer further benefits including up to 25,600 avoided non-fatal heart attacks, as well as preventing 5,000 asthma-related emergency room visits and avoiding 3.68 million days of work lost.

I know the tone of this post has been gloomy. It might be possible for me to not be consumed by frustration at the state of things, but if so, I’ve yet to figure out how. That said, it is good to know that the right choice will have benefits beyond “merely” keeping the planet hospitable to human life. As much as I’m afraid I’ll be saying this until I die of old age, it’s good that the only real obstacles to a better world are political. It means that we know we can do things differently, and make a better world in the process.

I think it’s also worth pointing out that the lives saved by taking these measures would be disproportionately poor and non-white. I’m in favor of real, targeted reparations, but the reality is that most actions we take to benefit all of humanity will benefit all humanity, if we actually do the work right. It should come as no surprise that those people most subjected to the ravages of pollution are also those with the least social and political power.

This study will do no more to move our so-called leaders than have the studies that came before it, but as with those prior studies, it makes it clear that we need to take matters into our own hands. Those who we’ve foolishly empowered to solve problems for us will not act until it is far too late. Sometimes that knowledge makes me despair, but then I remember that if we can figure out how to actually take the steps, a better world is within reach.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Are the rich safe from climate breakdown? Yes, and we should do something about that

Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist, and a climate activist. He’s doing work that’s desperately needed, and deserves our support. That said, I’m not sure whether I agree with how he framed a wildfire in California. The fire destroyed several multimillion dollar mansions near Laguna Beach on May 12th, prompting Kalmus to point out that the rich aren’t safe from Earth breakdown.

This feels like one of those times when something is technically correct – no human is safe from climate breakdown – but maybe less correct from both a practical and a tactical perspective. I admit that this may be a bit of a petty hair to split, but for some reason my brain hasn’t been cooperating today, but it’s happy to provide whatever this post is. I want to say again, because the internet seems to thrive on bullshit controversy, that I’m not “attacking” Peter Kalmus. If you want to categorize this post, you can view it as a well-meaning propagandist musing aloud about his craft. Ok? Ok.

There are three reasons why I think this post may be a little misguided. The first is that in practical terms, the rich are safe from climate breakdown. They’re safe from it in their heads, and their wealth will protect them from it for a long time. I think it’s fair to assume that everyone who owned those mansions had good insurance plans for them. Maybe there are some people with houses like that who would be ruined by the loss, but my impression is that for the most part, people with homes like that tend to have other homes in other locations. They can relocate without much difficulty. They might lose things of sentimental value, and they might even become slightly less wealthy, but that’s not the same as what happens when a normal person’s home burns.

The amount of safety will depend on how obscenely rich they are, but for the people at the top – the ones who could make a real difference on the climate issue if they cared to – it could well be more than a lifetime before their wealth runs out, if we don’t change how the world works, and take it away from them.

My second quibble is with what seems like an appeal to the wealthy. I see the value in trying to get those with power to do something, but I don’t think this accounts for who they really are – they’re people whose lives have demonstrated to them that they really can spend their way out of any problem. They are also people whose power and wealth came from having the means to make the world better, and choosing to enrich themselves instead. My impression of history is that they won’t learn the error of their ways until they are forced to by circumstance. If climate change is that circumstance, then it may be too late for the rest of us by then – it will take time for the wealthy to exhaust their resources.

Remember – these are people who can just buy themselves a state-of-the-art bunker on a whim, and stock it with a decade’s worth of food and water, without even considering where that money’s going to come from. They will try to create a neo-feudal climate hellscape with order enforced by paramilitaries fitted with shock collars, and by the time that fully falls apart on them, everything will be much, much worse. I don’t think they believe that they’re not safe, and I don’t think we can afford to wait for them to find out.

Finally, I worry that appeals like this perpetuate the idea that we have to ask our rulers to save the world. To quote Frederick Douglass, power concedes nothing without a demand, and I think the whole world will be far better off if we get our acts together and make that demand as soon as possible. The alternative is waiting until climate change scours away all of their power, and if that’s the path we take, they’ll use as many of us as human shields as possible to protect themselves. How many people will die by then? How much of our dwindling hope will be gone?

We should proceed as though the wealthy are safe from this global catastrophe, at least in the time frames that really matter right now. They’re safe for the same reason everyone else is not, and that should make us angry. They’re safe from climate change, and as long as that’s the case, humanity itself will continue to be in danger.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Tips for accessing reproductive healthcare in the United States

Whether or not the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe v. Wade has the exact language as the leaked memo, I think it’s safe to assume that the GOP will continue their relentless effort to make reproductive healthcare inaccessible. That won’t reduce the need for abortion and contraception, but it will make safe reproductive care difficult to access, and impossible for some. In some parts of the U.S., the “right” to an abortion exists only on paper, because of the logistical barriers that have been put in place. When confronted with unjust laws, it is right and just to break those laws, and when it comes to something like health care, I would say it’s our duty to do what we can to help those in need of care, to whatever degree we’re able. To that end, I’m linking some relevant resources. I’ll try to update this as I come across more materials, and I hope you folks will fill in any gaps in the comments. As with everything else, we’re at our strongest when we work together.

I have one more thing to add: The kinds of organizing and networking I periodically talk about are humanity’s original multi-tool for dealing with big problems. Having a network and knowing who in it believes what is a way for people to seek help. If you aren’t likely to need help yourself, it puts you in a position where others know that you might be able to provide it. Also a general reminder – if you’re planning to do something that could get you in trouble, don’t post about it online, and consider who might have access to your modes of communication.

This resource was last updated on the sixth of May, 2022.

There’s more on that thread that’s worth looking at.

https://janedrewfinally.tumblr.com/post/683342482378014720/officialravelry-anyway-i-said-i-would-do-this

https://janedrewfinally.tumblr.com/post/683342437548277760/are-you-angryscaredworried-about-potentially

https://janedrewfinally.tumblr.com/post/662273109179695104/gayjewishmagneto-liberaljane-abortion-is

https://janedrewfinally.tumblr.com/post/683208030398070784/you-dont-need-to-ask-for-jane-anymore-a-guide-to

Take care of yourselves, and take care of each other.

The Democrats are not blameless: Some thoughts about how we got here

It looks like we’re fast approaching an end to abortion rights in the United States, as guaranteed by the 1973 Supreme Court case known as Roe v. Wade. From what I can tell, overturning this case won’t just put reproductive rights in jeopardy, but a number of other civil rights as well. I might write more about that in the future, but there’s no shortage of commentary on the subject right now, and for today I wanted to talk about what it looks like when the people in power actually want to deliver on their promises.

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that the Democratic Party’s inability to deliver on their progressive promises isn’t just a matter of bumbling incompetence. There’s probably an element of that, but to me it looks like they don’t actually want to deliver, when it comes to left-wing policies. Some individuals within the party probably do, but the leadership? Not so much. They don’t do any of the things I’d expect them to do, were that the case.

The Republican Party are to blame for all of the vicious and harmful things they do, but not only do they represent a minority of the country, everybody knows they represent a minority, and they’re fairly often in the minority in government as well. When they are in government, the GOP seems to be far more effective at accomplishing their goals than their counterparts. I think we would be wise to look at how they do things, and take pointers about what can be done in pursuit of our goals, and on what it looks like when political leaders actually want to deliver on their promises.

Not everything will work as well for the left as it does for the right. Conservatives basically “win” every time they delay or roll back a change. They don’t care about the people being hurt by the status quo, so there’s no real sense of urgency about anything except stopping change. That means that it’s far, far easier for them to play a long game, and build up their political power through state and local politics. Conservatives also tend to push the interests of those in power, which means financial support, and an expectation of gentle treatment by the authorities. After the insurrection attempt on January 6th 2021, I saw some of the more revolution-hungry folks in the online left saying that that’s what we should be doing. The most common rebuttal was that there’s no way law enforcement would have such a gentle response to an insurrection attempt by a left-wing mob. We face different obstacles, so it stands to reason that we’ll need different tools at least some of the time.

That said, the GOP shows us what it looks like when a party actually has goals. I’ve said before that I feel the Democrats – or at least the party leadership – view politics as a sort of game. What seems to matter most to them is that the rules be followed, and that the two sides be as evenly matched as possible. Even if they might like to see some progressive change, it’s not something they’re willing to fight for. The Republicans, on the other hand, actually want a lot of the stuff they say they want, and so they do everything they can to get it. When they followed through on their promised Muslim ban, the GOP didn’t bother waiting for some committee to tell them what the courts would probably say, they just wrote the ban and tried it, knowing it would probably be shot down.

Knowing that there would be no penalty for trying.

It was shot down, they adjusted it to fit what the ruling said and tried again. That was shot down, and they adjusted and tried again. Rather than caring about “doing it right”, or playing by the rules, they have a goal in mind, and try everything they can think of to achieve it. The Democratic party only seems to be able to do that when it comes to things like funding the Pentagon. There’s a degree to which it’s useless to speculate on their “real” motivations, but they certainly don’t act as if any of the progress they promise is a real priority, and they haven’t acted like that at any point in my life.

I don’t know whether we have any shot at getting people like Biden or Pelosi to actually fight for the things they claim to want, but I think this is at minimum a good thing to consider when deciding whether they’re doing a good job. It’s been 49 years since Roe v Wade, and there has been a relentless effort – including terrorism – to end the right to abortion. Everyone knew this was coming, and yet for all the times the Democrats held power, and for all their endless campaigning about being the True Protectors™ of reproductive rights, they never followed through. They never actually made the right to abortion law.

And it sure as hell looks like they never actually tried.

Nobody in the party leadership is going to be directly hurt by this. They’re all rich. They’ll all be able to get abortions and any other reproductive care they need, and getting it isn’t going to cause them any financial or legal hardship. The same was true during the “Obamacare” fight – the people who took single-payer and the public option off of the table before negotiations started were never at risk of losing their access to healthcare. It’s not hard to see what it looks like when politicians actually want to achieve their stated goals, and I see no real evidence that anyone in the leadership of the Democratic party ever wanted anything more than endless fundraising off of the precarity of rights they never really intended to secure. It sure seems like they knew they were the only option for people who care about reproductive rights, and rather than deal with the problem, they chose to hold it over people’s heads for votes and contributions.

Everything about this situation makes me angry.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Tegan Tuesday: Congrats! You’re poor now!

Every January since 1981, the US Department of Health and Human Services updates the poverty guidelines (aka the poverty line) based on the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U). The poverty guidelines outline the eligibility criteria for a number of US assistance programs such as Medicaid or SNAP. The poverty thresholds were initially created in 1963 by Mollie Orshansky of the Social Security Administration (SSA). To quote from Health and Human Services,

Orshansky used a factor of three because the Agriculture Department’s 1955 Household Food Consumption Survey found that for families of three or more persons, the average dollar value of all food used during a week (both at home and away from home) accounted for about one third of their total money income after taxes.

In May 1965, the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity adopted Orshansky’s poverty thresholds as a working or quasi-official definition of poverty. In August 1969, the U.S. Bureau of the Budget (predecessor of the Office of Management and Budget) designated the poverty thresholds with certain revisions as the federal government’s official statistical definition of poverty.

Because of this metric, it’s assumed by the Powers That Be that approximately one third of household income is spent on rent, one third spent on food, and the remaining third spent elsewhere – that these ratios have remained unchanging for nearly a century. These are the same metrics that influence whether or not you can rent an apartment based on your income – property management often won’t allow you to spend more than a third of income for rent. Obviously there are ways and means around every system, and I mostly dealt with that in my own life by working with small scale landlords and trying to keep my rent spending below half of my income. When I initially became the primary breadwinner of my household, Abe and I were living in the Boston area, and so our rent was close to 75-80% of my income. And yet, we were ineligible for assistance, as the poverty line for a two-person household was $16,460 a year in 2017 — aka, less than our cheap Boston apartment by approximately $400. We could barely make rent, but we weren’t officially poor as the US government defined it. Note: this and all other statistics used in this article are based off of the rates for the contiguous US – Alaska and Hawai’i have higher numbers to account for their much higher living costs.

The CPI-U is based on the record of approximately 80,000 items each month gathered by thousands of data collectors. There are eight major spending categories (food and beverages; housing; apparel; transportation; medical care; recreation; education; other) and rates of increase can be sorted out by category, by region, or a few other divisions. My concerns with it’s value, as it’s currently set up, as a metric for poverty or government assistance programs can be quoted directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website:

One limitation is that the CPI-U may not be applicable to all population groups. For example, the CPI-U is designed to measure inflation for the U.S. urban population and thus may not accurately reflect the experience of people living in rural areas. The CPI-U does not produce official estimates for the rate of inflation experienced by subgroups of the population, such as the elderly or the poor. Note that we do produce an experimental index for the elderly population that is available upon request; however, because of the significant limitations of this experimental index, it should be interpreted with caution.

Another limitation is that the CPI-U cannot be used to measure differences in price levels or living costs between one area and another as it measures only time-to-time changes in each area. A higher index for one area does not necessarily mean that prices are higher there than in another area with a lower index. Instead, it means that prices have risen faster in the area with the higher index calculated from the two areas’ common reference period. Additionally, the CPI-U is a conditional cost-of-living measure; it does not attempt to measure everything that affects living standards. Factors such as social and environmental changes and changes in income taxes are beyond the definitional scope of the index and are excluded. [source https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm]

Because these are self-reported spendings from average, (I assume) middle-class Americans, they almost certainly don’t accurately reflect the spending habits and needs of the demographics that would be eligible for assistance! This is frustrating in a number of ways, and while I can certainly spitball reasons for why those demographics aren’t represented, it doesn’t change the fact that this seems to a problem built into the system. The spending habits of the non-poor was one of the reasons why the UK developed the Vimes Boots Index, after all. But unlike the UK system, I see no evidence that the US reports are built around luxury goods. They are just likely to be middle class. Apparently it was only in 2019 that telephone surveys were replaced as the primary means of data collection, so just think about who was likely to answer phone surveys on spending habits in the past decade – that’s who’s spending the index was based around.

As an additional contrast to the UK, I was pleasantly surprised to find that rent was one of the many things that was included as a metric for the CPI-U. According to the BLS, the CPI Housing survey covers approximately 0.11% of all rental properties in the US, with 32,000 units in the survey. I initially felt that was an outrageously small sample size, but a friend with more experience in population-sized datasets assures me that it’s a fairly normal ratio, so long as it is truly a representative sample. I was unable to find any clear details about how the housing survey is spread across the US, so please let me know if you have any ideas or further information! But I will optimistically assume that these rental properties are a true representative sample and are fairly spread across the US.

But rejoice! Look at how much the poverty line has increased this year! This means that more Americans are eligible for benefits and are able to take advantage of this opportunity. The higher the cut-off rate for government assistance, the more households that are eligible.

This image is a graph showing the total increase to the US poverty line, without accounting for inflation, since the year 2003. The increase varies from year to year, with the one from 2021 to 2022 being obviously larger than any other year.

This year’s cut off income for a single person household is $13,590 a year, or $1,132.50 per month. That is still outrageously (and intentionally) low. (Note: I did track the rate of change across multi-person households as well, but they follow roughly the same path as that of a single person, so I have simplified the data for ease viewing.) This surely is reflective of the current state of affairs, as the CPI-U takes into account the recent food hikes and the energy price increases and rents that always, always go up (albeit these are based on four-year old data, as that’s how long it takes to process the CPI-U). This $13.5k must be similar to the poverty rate of previous years. Factoring for inflation, however, actually tells a very different story.

The image is a graph showing the US poverty index from 2002 to 2022, adjusted for March 2022 rates. Since the high point in 2009 at just under 14800, the overall trend has been downward, with a slight recovery in the mid 2010s

This graph shows the income rates for a Single Person Household as given by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation and run through the inflation calculator provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. So each number, assigned in January of the given year, has been factored to represent the spending power of the USD in March 2022. And allowing for inflation, fewer and fewer American households are eligible for government assistance. This assistance could be housing aid, cheaper health insurance, or the various programs lumped together as ‘food stamps’. The only saving grace for poor Americans is that wages have also stagnated over the past two decades, so many people who were near the cut-off point might have slipped into eligibility without having to lose a dime.

It’s not a lie that this year’s poverty index has risen more than any other year in the past twenty – the average increase (not accounting for inflation) is 2.17% and this year’s is a 5.51% from 2021. But inflation has completely overrun everything else, making it harder and harder for the average American to stretch their dollar even as far as it did two years ago. I think it should go without saying, but just in case, I don’t think that anyone should be struggling to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads.

The past decade has involved a great deal of unlearning my own shame and stigma with being labeled ‘poor’. I am poor – I grew up poor, and for most of my adult life, I have been poor. I have known people with less than me, but I have never been so comfortable as to not worry about food insecurity. It’s probably pretty clear from the guest posts I have done here, but ready access to affordable and healthy food is one of my biggest concerns for the planet. While the new poverty line won’t bring help to as many American households as it should, hopefully it will have an impact on more than it did previously. If you or someone you know is eligible for assistance based off of the new numbers, please start the process to apply. It absolutely sucks – US food and housing assistance have some of the worst bureaucratic hurdles to jump over. But for anyone making under $20k a year, every little bit helps. And even those of us who aren’t near the cut-off point – now’s a good time to start investing in household food storage and larger food networks. Exiting the pandemic, we all could use a little social activity. Why not make it a supper club or a regular potluck? This is social and network building, while also not straining any given household’s resources. More and more people are going to be considered ‘poor’ rather than ‘comfortable’ or even simply ‘middle-class’, and the sooner we can build solidarity among the working poor, the sooner we can build enough momentum to change the system.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: What is (and is not) anti-fascism?

Way back in 2017, Abigail Thorn published The Philosophy of Antifa – an hour-long breakdown of what “antifa” means, what it doesn’t mean, and what motivates those who make antifascist action a priority. It’s an excellent video, and I highly recommend it to everyone. Now, Leon of Renegade Cut has published his own video on anti-fascism. It delves into the history of opposition to fascism, going back to Italian WW1 veterans organizing to oppose Mussolini.

More importantly, it looks at what caused various anti-fascist resistance movements of the past to fail – very often too long of a delay before organized opposition. This is a sobering and vitally important look at history and at our current conditions. If long videos are hard for you, I recommend treating it like a podcast or an audiobook – I often listen to this sort of thing while I’m doing dishes or playing a video game. I wish this stuff was just a matter of niche historical interest, but unfortunately it’s still very relevant to the challenges we face today, so it’s my opinion that everyone should check this out:

The history of climate science, for a denier in my comments.

Someone apparently objects to my comment moderation policy, and seems to have that delightful conservative reflex of trying to make people they disagree with angry. I’m posting this not to put a target on the commenter, but because he serves as a useful reminder that there are still a lot of people out there who don’t know this stuff. I would say that it is partly their own fault, but not entirely. We know for a fact that the fossil fuel industry has known about this for decades, and that they responded by pouring millions of dollars into a decades-long propaganda campaign. The amount of misinformation on this issue has been staggering. In my opinion those responsible are guilty of crimes against humanity. That said, I don’t think everyday deniers are entirely blameless.

At this point, I feel that ignorance on such a big issue – and it’s big even if you’re in denial about the science – is at least partly a choice. All of this information is publicly available. Almost all of it I learned after I graduated college. Getting a bachelor’s degree in biology definitely gave me the tools to better evaluate the science for myself, but any scientist knows that that’s nowhere close to expertise in any branch of science. I’m more trained than a “layman”, but I don’t think that’s saying much.

Even without that training, the world is full of people who have explained this stuff in a myriad of different ways. For whatever reason, those explanations haven’t gotten through to this particular commenter, so I figured I’d put in my oar.

“Bigots, doomers, and trolls will have their comments edited or deleted. ”
Guess I should do my best to be considered one of those. BTW I consider YOU a ‘doomer’. It isn’t that I do not ‘believe’ in ‘climate change’. Rather I recognize no reason why it should not – unpredictably, but likely conforming to past patterns of experience in large part. It is fun to hear you refer to disbelief in anthropogenic global warming / climate change as a matter for a ‘conspiracy theory’ – although when government levies a tax it is no secret what their theft is about. Nor is it especially credible that man should be responsible for change decades hence. Such a projection is still the speculation it ever was. Not even the I.P.C.C. calls its computer emulation of the function of crystal balls factual – though if one is silly enough it can be called credible. There is no data – nor can there be. Things which have not happened remain unmeasurable..

I tend to allow a little leeway for discussion, disagreement, and so on. My problem comes when we enter the realm of advocacy, or when we start going in circles. The “doomers” in question are those who think our extinction due to climate change is inevitable and near, and therefor we shouldn’t bother doing anything about it. It’s the flip side of those who say the problem isn’t happening, so we shouldn’t do anything about it.

As to your claim that it’s “not especially credible”, I’m afraid the only two reasons why you’d say that are dishonesty or ignorance. I’ll assume – for now – that it’s ignorance, and we’ll see where that goes. To begin with, you seem to think that the field of climate science is a relatively new one.

It’s not.

We’ve known how CO2 interacts with heat in our atmosphere since 1856. When I say “known”, I mean that Eunice Foote was able to measure it then. Her work has since been confirmed countless times by countless people, and versions of it are still used as science fair projects to this day.

The first prediction that CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels would raise this planet’s temperature was in 1896, by Swedish chemist and physicist Svante Arrhenius. This wasn’t just a guess. He and many others had found evidence of past ice ages, and were studying what could cause such a thing to happen, when another scientist approached him with his evidence that carbon dioxide from burning coal was actually accumulating in the atmosphere. The prediction was made not based on random guesswork, but based on the measurable physical properties of carbon dioxide, and the measurable rate of increase in the atmosphere.

That was 126 years ago, also known as 12.6 decades.

When Arrhenius made the prediction, he calculated it would take around 3,000 years for the climate to warm enough for palm trees to grow in Sweden, and he was pretty happy about the idea. That was based on fossil fuel consumption in the 1890s, you understand. The rate of consumption has gone up a bit since then.

Already you can see that this isn’t a prediction NOW about something happening in the future, so much as a prediction from the past that we’ve checked over and over and over for over a century, and that has turned out to be accurate, no matter how many times we run the numbers.

This is what science is. It’s a method for taking information we know, and using it to make predictions, which are then tested.

The field of climate science continued after Arrhenius’ work, of course. The term “climate change” goes back to the 1930s, if memory serves, but it was in the late 1950s when things really kicked off. That’s when Charles Keeling started making some noise about what his CO2 measurements at Mauna Loa observatory were showing. This graph is known as “Keeling Curve“:

1958 is also when the first televised warning about climate change appeared on Bell Telephone Science Hour:

I want to emphasize, again, that all of this was literal decades before that warming was measurable. This is not something scientists came up with after the fact to explain warming that was being seen, it’s something scientists successfully predicted decades before it happened. In the case of Arrhenius, he predicted it and then died of old age decades before it happened. It was also – in case I need to tell you this – decades before computer models or the IPCC existed.

The creation of the IPCC was the moment when governments realized that they should at least look like they were doing something about this problem. That’s what the “I” of that acronym is – “Intergovernmental”.

That came almost a century after the first prediction of global warming caused by human activities, and it came because the evidence had already been overwhelming for years

This is no different from Eratosthenes measuring the circumference of the earth in 276 B.C.E., literally thousands of years before we were able to actually circumnavigate it whenever we wanted, or even go into space and take a look from the outside. It’s no different from our ability to predict that a dramatic increase in the number of new smokers THIS year, will lead to a measurable increase in cases of lung cancer a few decades down the line.

Every aspect of your life involves technology that came from predictions made decades or centuries before those predictions were realized. This is not the divine revelation of prophecy, it’s just a basic understanding of the material realities of our world.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Münecat’s video on climate change and capitalism

So first of all, fair warning – Münecat seems to be every bit as angry about climate change as I am, and has a somewhat blue sense of humor. Beyond the entertainment value, I’m also posting this because of a point she makes near the end – that the capitalist solution to climate change seems to be things like privately operated “migrant detention facilities”.

I’m working on a longer piece about some of the implications of leaving the current world order in place. I’m hoping that’ll be done tomorrow, but we shall see. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this particular bit of carefully crafted internet weirdness: